


what happens to water that isn't loved?

by sandandsalt



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-25
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-12-09 12:37:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/774276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandandsalt/pseuds/sandandsalt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There is the thought, though it is a small one, that Downton Abbey was carved from the boughs of winter. " The Crawley women and grief. Post S3 Christmas Special.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what happens to water that isn't loved?

**Author's Note:**

> More a warm-up set of thoughts than much of a fic. Title from "Winter in Gold River", a poem by Catie Rosemurgy. I don't know how to write half these characters. Sorry.

There is the thought, though it is a small one, that Downton Abbey was carved from the boughs of winter.

Frost-bitten things. Lady Violet was always of that kind. In the old days, they used to watch her bathe her skin in mottled furs, take the late Lord Grantham’s hand in a long, gloved sleeve. The jewels on her ears had been clear as snow. And they had gone out walking when there was the dappling of flakes on the Abbey’s grounds, when the trees were raw and bare and orange in their nakedness, as if all their warmth was seeping through transparent skins. Their Countess had never been daunted by it, the bleakness of the season. Grey skies and grey land and everything covered in white sameness. She had liked to wear blue, then, in winter.

”Winter is much like a purge, Carson,” she had told him in shrill confidence as he had removed the coat from her shoulders, “and we both know how dearly this country needs a proper purge.”

Now, it feels as though everything is winter-cold, and that the house is constantly in a purge of its own.

Carson wonders how much more they must give to this constant season, how much emptiness one must endure before the flame is lit again.

-

Lady Mary always had a face made for black and white, and now, perhaps, her bones are made for it too. Her mourning gowns sits too naturally against her breast. They make her look skeletal, is his thought, spectral.

She has spent much of her time in the nursery. She holds her son and lets his fingers grow and curl around hers. Let go. Curl again.

”He’s getting stronger,” is what she says, to him, but a butler is as good as an empty room.

He gives her his routine affirmative. He doesn’t know what else he can do.

-

”She glowed when held him first, that’s what Anna said, she glowed,” The now-Countess says in her sea-voice. It always seems out of place, even now, even after all these years, even when there doesn’t seem like much of a place for anything. Cora holds her teacup with fingers curled around its painted base, like the cradling of a child.

”I don’t think I glowed,” the Countess says.

The three women are ignoring the obvious shadow in the room. Ladies of their status are accustom to doing so.

”Of course you didn’t,” Lady Rosamund’s voice is the image of her mother. They used to say that about her regularly, the image of her mother. “Women like us only glow if we have sons. It can’t be helped.”

The image of her mother watches the reality of her mother place her cup down with steady indifference. If there was an accusation in those words, veiled as all are, it passes, ignored.

”Sybil used to glow, too,” the Countess intones and her vowels are soft around their edges, like sea foam. ”They all used to glow.”

-

Lady Mary keeps Carson at her side, because she has always kept him there. Keeping a butler at one’s side is much like keeping a shadow, but it does her well to have a shadow now, because having a shadow means one has light and having light means one has life and some days, she needs to be reminded of that.

She can speak to Carson, too. She doesn’t, but she knows she could – truly speak. (But her voice is sealed with ice and so she lets him pour her tea, watch her, stiff back, from the side of the door. There is a spinal cord of sadness, vast and sharp-edged, holding the two of them together; it feeds on the silence.)

The only employment for people with money, she thinks at one point when the sky is too drained to be day or noon or night or anything that settles, like dust on the windowsill, into any recognizable form, the only employment for people with money is to inspect their own brokenness. This a thought they learned early, the three of them. The two of them. (The one of her. Mary reminds herself to stop counting ghosts.) They used to spend some summer days lounging in the library. In-between moments, when there was no governess to straighten their wrists, when Mama was distracted and Papa was busy. Caught in the slow amber of waiting, they’d pick books off from the shelf and Mary would always read them because her voice was better. Edith always read too quickly and Sybil had been more eager to listen. They had spread their pastel skirts along the scarlet sofa, and Mary had read about knights and careful heroines and the sorts of adventures that could be gleaned from yellowed pages.

It had been Edith who had said that it must be lovely to be both beautiful and broken, being, as she was, neither. At least, certainly not enough, not in the eyes of her peers nor those who mattered. Not in the eyes of any narrator.

”I don’t think anyone’s broken,” Sybil had said, and her mouth had pursed and plumped with girlish indignation. Her lips had been full and red.

Mary says, “Do you ever feel, Carson –“

But then her throat closes again and she can only speak in ghosts.

-

Mary tries to remember Granny in grief. Lord Grantham had died in winter and Granny had gone walking on her own. The trees had bent away from her, as if they were trying to make room from the gouge that had ripped through the household. Mary remembers Papa and Aunt Rosamund standing at the doorstep. Aunt Rosamund had touched Papa’s hand, only barely. Mama had placed a hand on her shoulder and by the windowsill, where she and her sisters had gathered, Mary had thought her mother’s touch as rough and jarring as a match.

Granny did not have a cane then, though she was beginning to need one. (Perhaps she had needed one long before, the thought dawned, in a sudden moment, blanketing all of their minds in a soft fog, but she had leaned upon Grandpapa in the slightest ways for so long that none of them had noticed.) She had walked her straightest on that walk back. (And the trees had blown towards her, and the trees had bowed to her.) Violet Crawley had returned with her head high behind the black latticework of her veil.

The tears had frozen against her bones.

(The last line was servant’s gossip. Mary cannot recall ever seeing her grandmother cry.)

-

Black had not suited Granny in the way Mary is beginning to think it suits her. Those dresses, with their dark-stoned collars, were left behind quickly for half-mourning purple. Mary thinks her grandmother has always had inclination to those colours, but whether it was out of the sticky residue of loss or because she was named like it, named to be alike it, one cannot say.

-

When Lord Painswick died, they had all gathered again in Rosamund’s London parlour. The Dowager Countess of Grantham, who now clutched her bone-ivory cane with the effortless grace with which a proper Lady holds any of her limbs, had remarked that she had always hated his room. “Garish, these walls.”

Rosamund had come down her stairs and looked as marble as her hallways, a weight to her shoulders none of them had ever seen before. Her hair had looked darker. Her lips had been thin. There had been less blood in her, that was the clearest way any of them could describe it.

She had held the railing, for a brief moment, when she made her quiet descent and her mother had disapproved.

-

Rosamund had talked for a very long time in the hallway, right before she had made that final step down the staircase, eased herself onto the same plane as the rest of them. She had spoken of all of London’s gossip (of which she had always been an avid consumer and sometimes indulger; the Painswicks had had their fingers on the pulse of every scandal), but there had been a hollowness to her voice. A lack of animation.

”It’s as though,” Mama had said on the ride home, “someone has carved her insides out of her.”

The underlying morbidity of their mother’s words had put them all at unease; they had smoothed their black skirts free of nerves. Cora had reached out and adjusted Sybil’s hair.

-

(Mary does not remember her mother in grief as much as she feels it. She never thought they walked, any of them, the three of them, with the touch of absence, but now that he is gone, Mary thinks perhaps they all do.)

-

Carson pours the tea. Like most motions in the nursery, it is an automatic one. He doesn’t feel his wrist tilt, it simply does. The steam rises from the china cup. Carson waits.

They both delight in foreign smiles, ones that seem to crack both of their faces in old, unfamiliar lines, when George learns sounds, when he smiles, when he cries in any language other than tears.

Mary has her tea when her son sleeps.

”You can’t leave me now, Carson,” is what she says. But she doesn’t look at him. Carson has spent too many hours in this room with her. He feels aged by the suspension of these moments, by the way the sun never shines right through the windows, despite all the fussing the maids have made. He spends too much time here. There are duties to be done. In his mind, Mrs. Hughes reprimands him. But Mrs. Hughes has not said a harsh word since George was born, not about any of this. The heaviness rests over them all.

Mary isn’t looking at him and that troubles him some, the way she will and then won’t meet eyes. She doesn’t look at him in this room, doesn’t look at anyone, really. (If she is mad, Carson doesn’t think he would care. He would love her even in her madness. This is what a father does.)

(But she isn’t mad. A father knows these things too. Lady Mary isn’t mad; Lady Mary is grieving, and it is a different plague unto itself.)

”I know you will. I know we all do, now. But you can’t, you understand? I don’t know what I’d do right now if you did.”

-

“It’s funny,” is something else she says, “that I can hold him.”

Carson does not question, because he knows she is not speaking to him, but around him. She is not speaking to him, but she isn’t speaking to any other than him. George leans gently against her breast.

”I feel as though I can’t hold much of anything anymore. Never for too long.”

-

At the first snowfall, Carson holds Mary’s coat along the rigid line of her shoulder.

Mary is a solitary figure of black against the dustings of white on the ground. Carson watches her go. Carson adjusts the green stalks of brittle roses. The china-vase catches stillness in its open mouth.

Mary catches stray snowflakes against the gloved palm of her hand. They lie for a moment and then melt. They feel like nothing. They feel like the absence of touch. (Mary thinks of holding George underneath these trees. She thinks of him catching snowflakes with his bare hands. She thinks of the way his skin will burn them into tears.) Above her, the trees rattle and crackle with their own secret warmth. Mary pulls the coat tighter around her chest, gathers herself deeper inside it.

The trees bow when she comes home.


End file.
